Informed Comment

Supporting Nawal Saadawi

Al-Hayat on Saturday ran an attack from a Muslim fundamentalist point of view on Egyptian novelist Nawal Saadawi. She recently argued that children should all receive hyphenated last names, from both the mother’s and the father’s side, instead of only the last name of the father. She said that this method would allow families to acknowledge the equal contribution of each parent to the child.

The Al-Hayat article ridiculed and attacked Saadawi. It quoted Shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi at length on how here suggestion is contrary to Islamic law (though al-Qaradawi did not actually demonstrate this allegation, and most of his points were just the ramblings of a male chauvinist. Al-Qaradawi is an elderly, old-time Muslim Brotherhood activist now settled in Qatar. He can sometimes be unconventional, but not on issues like this.

The the article quoted Camillia Hilmi, a woman Muslim fundamentalist who is Phyllis Schlafly’s Arab twin. She went on at length about how there is a wicked feminist cabal in the West that hates men and wants to exterminate them so that women can rule the world. She also accused them of tampering with the New Testament, so as to make God a woman in their text. She said that unfortunately, this feminist cabal dominated the committees of the United Nations. She then complained that Saadawi has fallen under their malevolent influence.

Saadawi has long been a target of Egyptian Muslim fundamentalists, and even made the secular government of Anwar El Sadat nervous enough to arrest her. She wrote a novel about Sadat, The Fall of the Imam. It enraged the religious right in Egypt. The Al-Azhar Seminary has recently started a campaign to have it formally banned by the Egyptian government. Please sign the letter of solidarity for Nawal Saadawi on the Web.

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Things are Not What they Seem Department

On Thursday night on the David Letterman Late Night show on CBS, actress Natalie Portman announced that she was studying Arabic.

On Friday night on the LBC Arabic satellite network the main attraction was a karaoke contest that involved a fair number of old American disco songs from Gloria Estefan and Donna Summer.

More evidence that Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations, doesn’t have the slightest idea what he is talking about.

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Election Plans Roiled
Sunni Extremist Death Threats against Sistani

Hamza Hendawi of AP reports that the Shiite vote may get split. He says that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is declining to join the mega-Shiite party list toward which Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is working. Likewise, it is not clear that Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers will join the big list, since they are dissatisfied with the offer of only 10 percent of the list’s seats in parliament.

It seems to me that the Shiites needn’t any longer worry too much about a split list. I can’t imagine that Allawi’s list is going to do all that well, since his Iraqi National Accord, consisting of ex-Baathists, isn’t very popular and he is potentially a lame duck. Why would southern Shiites vote for ex-Baathists who ordered Marines into Najaf last August? Only if Allawi has enormous advantages of incumbency could his list overcome all his negatives.

President Ghazi Yawir seems to me unlikely to get many Shiite votes. Since he took Iraqi cabinet minister and Kurdish activist Nasrin Barwari as a second wife, he might pick up some Kurdish votes. (To underline the complexities of Iraq, Barwari is something of a feminist.) The Shamar tribe, which Yawir does not head but from whose chiefly family he comes, does have a small Shiite section, but it isn’t big and many Iraqi tribes are religiously split like that. I can’t see how Yawir can translate that fact into any significant number of Shiite votes. My guess is that most Shiites will vote as they think Sistani wants them to.

If the Sadrists run their own list, they might not do so badly, and if they mobilize poor Shiites to vote who otherwise might stay home, they might well actually increase the proportion of the national vote that goes to the Shiites.

So I now think the Shiites will manage to get their parliamentary majority. The real danger is that the Sunni Arabs will stay home, and the Shiites get 85% of the seats. If that happens, the religious Shiite parties are likely to dominate parliament, perhaps even holding 51% of seats (138 of 275).

A rear-guard Sunni Arab (and other) effort to postpone the elections grew in force on Friday, with 17 small parties now agitating for a 6-month delay. So far, however, the leading Shiite figures and parties are insisting on going ahead in January, and both Allawi and Bush seem to be committed.

It could be argued that the elections may as well be held in January, since 1) the security situation is not actually likely to be better in six months and 2) postponement might try the patience of Sistani, who insisted on early elections and can bring hundreds of thousands of protesters into the street with a single word. A Shiite agitation for elections at a time when most Sunnis want a delay could produce communal rioting.

An argument for delay is that security is so bad in the country that elections can easily be disrupted. Already, 90 out of 540 voter registration sites are closed. The guerrillas can strike at will into the heavily fortified Green Zone. On Friday they killed four British employees and wounded at least 14 with mortar fire. The kind of mortar they used has a range of many miles, so all they had to do was bring it in close enough on a flatbed truck with a cover, uncover, fire, and then disappear. The point is that if a hard target like the Green Zone (government offices, US embassy) can still be struck at will, then soft targets like hundreds of polling stations are sitting ducks. January 30 could be a bloodbath. Iraqis, aware of this, are already complaining about plans to use schools as polling places, since they don’t want their children bombed.

Already, Al-Zaman reports that guerrillas in Mosul targeted voter registration offices in Mosul this week, setting at least one on fire, and directing death threats at election workers.

Of course, the other problem with holding the elections on Jan. 30 is that many Sunni Arabs are angry and sullen and are likely to boycott. There is no point in holding elections that have no legitimate outcome.

Sunni radicals are aware that the Shiite grand ayatollah, Sistani, is a key obstacle to their own dreams of a Taliban state in Iraq, and some think they know what to do about that. KarbalaNews.net reports in Arabic that Salafi (Sunni fundamentalist) websites in Saudi Arabia– which have a direct and indirect impact on the situation in Iraq– have issued a call for the assassination of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf. One Salafi cleric, writing at Muntadiyat al-Qimmah, rejected all Shiite pleas for Muslim unity because, he said, Shiites are “more deserving of being killed than the Crusaders.”

KarbalaNews complains that such sites present doctored “sayings” falsely attributed to the Prophet Muhammad commanding jihad against the Shiites. (The Sunni-Shiite split did not exist at the time of Muhammad, d. 632).

Aside from the report of the content of this Salafi site, which the author says has the support of Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, this article demonstrates the great fear Iraqi Shiites have of Saudi Wahhabism, which has through the past two and a half centuries been fiercely anti-Shiite.

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Iraq and Damned Statistics

The Red Crescent has finally been allowed into Fallujah (its earlier exclusion was probably a violation of international law). Its spokesman is saying that less than 200 civilian families appear to still be there. If this estimate is true, it suggests that by the time of the US assault, only about 5,000 persons were left in the city. At least 2000 were killed, some 1400 captured, some escaped, and a handful of civilian families remained. If Fallujah was a ghost town before the assault, that would help explain the repeated US military assertion of virtually no civilian casualties (which is still not entirely plausible). But it would also raise a question as to the effectiveness of the assault. Fallujah’s population was estimated at between 250,000 and 300,000. If only 5,000 or so were left, then obviously a great many guerrilla fighters, whether full- or part-time, escaped. The few remaining civilian families suffered from lack of food, contrary to earlier assertions of US military spokespersons.

Al-Hayat plays anti-al-Jazeera on Saturday, running an article about how the Fallujans are furious at the “mujahidin” who fought the Americans using their city as a base. One Interviewee among the survivors said that if a holy warrior proffered his hand, he’d rip it to pieces with his teeth. The Fallujans complain that the radical Muslim fundamentalists established themselves in the poorest city quarters, paying exorbitant rents, even though residents pleaded with them to fight the Americans outside the city. One said that anyone who made such arguments was tagged by the militants as an American sympathizer and received death threats.

Do I detect sarcasm toward the US military in the column of Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough? They ridicule Centcom for claiming that the Fallujah operation had broken the back of the guerrilla effort and for suggesting that Fallujah was the greatest battle since the fall of Baghdad. They have also drawn up “talking points” for those wishing to defend the operation, which underline how many explosives were in Fallujah; charge that every one of the city’s 77 mosques had been used as a weapons storage facility or fortress for attack; and added that “In one sector alone, a Marine unit found 91 caches and 432 IEDs. As a comparison, in October in all of Iraq, the coalition found 130 arms caches and 348 IEDs.”

Since there are an estimated 250,000 tons of explosives and munitions missing from the prewar Baath stockpiles, I fear that whatever was found in Fallujah was a drop in the bucket. And, a lot of Iraqi cities must be full of such materiel. And, contrary to the “broken back” imagery, a confidential Marine report suggested that the guerrilla war would grow in intensity and breadth in the build-up to the January 30 elections.

Alas, even Fallujah itself is still a problem. Guerrillas staged a shootout on Friday that killed two marines (3 guerrillas died as well).

Not only were many Iraqis disturbed at the way the Fallujah campaign was conducted, but they were upset about the assault by Iraqi national guards and US troops on the Abu Hanifa mosque in Baghdad last Friday. Mosque preachers, both Sunni and Shiite, universally condemned the raid yesterday in the Friday sermons. Al-Zaman says that Shaikh Adnan Dulaimi, the head of the Sunni Pious Endowments Board, called on the United Nations, the Arab League and other international organizations to intervene to ensure that no further such attacks on mosques are conducted by the Allawi government or the American and coalition forces. Iraqi Muslims were especially appalled that the attack took place during Friday prayers, and resulted in 2 deaths of worshippers. The US maintains that the mosque was a center for the guerrilla war.

Daily Outrage, at The Nation’s website, lists some statistics that were not in the New York Times op-ed piece on Friday. For instance, 90 of 540 voter registration stations in Iraq are closed owing to poor security. And here is the coup de grace:

Iraqi Public Opinion

** Only 33 percent of Iraqis think they’re better off now than before the war, as a Gallup poll discovered.

** Just 36 percent believe the interim government shares their values.

** 94 percent say Baghdad is more dangerous than it was before the war.

** 66.6 believe the US occupation could start a civil war.

** 80 percent want the US to leave directly after the January elections.

[Note added 11/28/04. I got a long email message disputing these polling numbers, some of which seem drawn from IRI rather than from Gallup (as advertised), and which, my correspondent argued, cherry-picked the results in an unfair way. I don't have time to double-check all this, so note here: caveat emptor.]

The London Times reports that nearly 700 persons die under suspicious circumstances (most of them from bullet wounds) every month in Baghdad. These are not, at least mainly, victims of the guerrilla war. They are mostly victims of crime or revenge. I figure that as 8400 murders a year in a city of 5 million, or 168 per 100,000 per annum. The highest murder rate in the US for 2003 was 45.8 per 100,000, in Washington, DC, with Detroit coming in second. That is, Baghdad is nearly four times as dangerous as the most dangerous American cities, more than a year and a half after the fall of Saddam. The US has by its stupid mistakes deprived Baghdad’s residents of the basic right to personal security. It is true that Saddam’s secret police used to dump bodies at the morgue, of course. But all the polls show that Baghdadis feel themselves substantially worse off in personal security now, and no wonder.

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Guest Editorial: Levine: “Iraq’s Lose-Lose Scenario”

Note: This version of the text is slightly revised from the one posted earlier on Friday November 26.

Iraq’s Lose-Lose Scenario

By Mark LeVine

Dept. of History, UC Irvine, author of Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the ‘Axis of Evil’.

Since November 2 I have often heard it said that in an environment where the majority of Americans are divided, cynical and distrustful of their fellow citizens and government, it was natural for them to choose a strong, conservatively religious President with a narrow political vision to lead them. If true, this dynamic does not augur well for the Iraq that will emerge after January 30.

Underlying the decision to confirm Iraqi elections for the end of January are two important calculations: first, that the US military can manage the ongoing violence well enough to permit elections to take place across broad swaths of the country; second, that they will produce an outcome favorable both to the Bush and Allawi Administrations. Only time will tell if such optimism is warranted; the plea issued today by seventeen Iraqi parties to delay elections because of the “threats facing national unity” and “strong political polarization because of sectarian roots” do not augur well for a positive outcome. But even if they are held on or close to schedule, it is almost certain is that the elections will symbolize a frustration rather than fulfillment of the freedom, democracy and prosperity the US and its Coalition allies pledged to bring to Iraq twenty some months ago.

In this context, the ostensible “victory” of US forces in Falluja marks a strategic turning point for the United States; not because it has come close to enabling truly democratic elections by destroying the insurgency, but rather because it revealed a deepening erosion of solidarity between Shi‘i and Sunni Iraqis that is the United States’ only hope for maintaining a long-term presence in the country. Such lack of solidarity is in contrast to the mutual aid and support displayed during the Falluja and Najaf invasions of last spring. Had it been translated into coordinated Sunni-Shi‘i resistance–Sadr City exploding along with Falluja– the occupation would have quickly become untenable.

Indeed, as the human, moral and material toll of the occupation skyrocketed, most Arab Iraqis, Shi‘a and Sunnis alike, have come to abhor the American presence along with an Allawi government viewed as little more than an American puppet. We don’t have to look far to figure out why they: 100,000 deaths and counting, untold billions of dollars of property and infrastructure damage, a barely-functioning health system, massive unemployment, and official corruption that is so pervasive that one of Prime Minister Allawi’s senior advisors described the Government to me as “Saddam with new faces”–all are better recruiting tools for an insurgency than a dozen bin Laden and Zarqawi videos.

In this context sustained Iraqi Arab unity would have meant the defeat of the occupation and an ignoble American retreat from Iraq. But its opposite, intercommunal hostility and even violence, will just as surely mean the defeat of democracy, peace and prosperity. This is the stark choice facing Iraq in the coming weeks, and the US management of the occupation has encouraged both trends since March, 2003: by creating both a weak state open to US influence and a weakened society too torn by internal strife to unite against the occupation.

There are many reasons why the solidarity between Sunnis and Shi‘a, which has historically been tenuous, dissipated in the last six months. To begin with, while leaders of the two communities have exerted great efforts to promoting sectarian harmony (made easier by the fact that so many Iraqi families are a mix of both sects, and even Kurds as well), numerous interviews I conducted while in Iraq earlier this year, seconded by the often insulting and sometimes incendiary language of sectarian media, reveal significant suspicion and even hostility between the two groups after the toppling of the Hussein regime. This was heightened by acts of extreme violence, including suicide bombings that killed more than 150 Shi‘a in Karbala and Baghdad, and the murders of many religious figures on both sides.

But the historical staying power of an “Iraqi” rather than sectarian identity, coupled with the grind of an occupation beset by failed promises and worsening violence, made common cause a logical option among many Sunnis and Shi‘a (especially the poorer Shi‘a who are attracted to Moqtada al-Sadr). Such sentiments remained strong even as the Shi‘i establishment has by and large supported–or at least tolerated–the American presence as a way to secure power based on their position as the country’s largest ethniic or religious group.

This calculus has clearly changed in the last few months. Of the many reasons for this, perhaps the most important is that so many victims of the revolt have been Shi‘a, especially the police and army recruits and officers killed in large numbers at least once every week or two. Such attacks, along with the presence of many (perhaps thousands) of foreign and often anti-Shi‘i Sunni fighters in Iraq, have resurrected the Shi‘i anger at the suffering they endured under Saddam’ rule, when Sunnis were generally accorded better treatment communally than their Shi‘i neighbors.

In this situation, as one former high ranking Governing Council official explained to me, “This time around in Falluja the Shi‘i view was, “‘Good, let the Sunnis feel what we felt all those years under Hussein’.”” Indeed, if a figure whose ear is as close to the proverbial Shi‘i street as Moqtada al-Sadr remained largely silent as Falluja burned, it seems clear that most Shi‘a have decided that however much they dislike the occupation or Allawi, both are needed to cement Shi‘i political power and defeat an increasingly Sunni insurgency that would be very costly and nearly impossible for the Shi‘a to combat on their own.

Such a sentiment has enabled the US and Iraqi authorities to transform an Arab into a Sunni revolt, with Shi‘a and Kurds predominating among the forces fighting alongside the Americans and leaders in both communities stressing the political and religious duty to vote. Of course, Ayatollah Sistani and the Shi‘i establishment might well be playing the United States: using the elections to solidify political power, after which it the Americans will be asked–or forced–to leave‘’. The worse the violence, however, the less the chance of this happening anytime soon. But also the lesss the chance of peace, reconstruction or a functioning democracy, so far the still-born birthright of post-Saddam Iraq.

Mark Levine

Department of History

University of California Irvine

mlevine

@

uci

.edu

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25,000 US Casualties in Iraq; 9% of Troops Put in Hospital or Killed
Over 2000 Iraqis Killed in Fallujah

CBS has elicited from the Pentagon the real figure of US casualties in Iraq, which is more like 25,000. That number includes the 1230 or so killed and the 9300 classified as “wounded in battle,” but also 17,000 classified as non-combat sick or injured, of whom 80 percent do not return to their units in Iraq. Although some of the 17,000 are victims of disease, some unspecified number have actually been injured as a result of being in a theater of war. If you have an “accident” while guns and bombs are going off all around you, is it really an “accident”?

The Editor and Publisher piece blames the “US press” for under-reporting these figures. But obviously it is the Department of Defense that constructed the categories that allowed some war heroes to be shunted off as victims of “accidents.” So it isn’t the press’s fault. It is Donald Rumsfeld’s fault (and, sure, Karl Rove and George W. Bush, the Teflon Twins).

The Iraqi Defense Ministry has admitted that 2085 Iraqis were killed in the course of the US assault on Fallujah. The same ministry, along with US military spokesmen, keep denying that any civilians were killed.

Personally, I would take all these statistics with a big grain of salt. The US has bombed so many buildings in Fallujah in recent weeks that there must be bodies still in the rubble. Will the rubble be combed for dead bodies? And, even if, as some US military personnel have suggested, 95% of civilians had fled, that would be on the order of 15,000 persons. How likely is it that a massive military assault on residential neighborhoods killed none of them?

Some un-embedded wire service reports suggest a different picture, saying that Fallujah survivors :

“charged, in interviews, that as well as deaths from bombs and artillery shells, a large number of people, including children, were killed by American snipers. Some of the killings took place in the build-up to the assault on the rebel stronghold, and at least in one case, that of the death of a family of seven, including a 3-month-old baby, American authorities have admitted responsibility and offered compensation. Men of military age were particularly vulnerable. But there are also accounts of young children, women and old men being killed.

Mere common sense, it seems to me, makes these reports more credible than blithe claims of no “collateral damage” at all. On the other hand, Iraqi guerrillas are perfectly capable of manufacturing US war crimes where none existed, as part of their own propaganda war. That there were almost certainly civilian casualties does not in and of itself tell us whether the military assault was necessary, or whether it was conducted as it should have been.

The fog of information war thrown up by the Allawi government, the US military, and the guerrilla sympathizers, however, does make the episode difficult to judge morally and ethically. In a democracy, such judgments are necessary, so that there is something radically wrong with the system, when we ordinary Americans don’t have a realistic idea of how many US troops have been harmed in the prosecution of this war, and likewise have no clear idea of the human cost of an operation like Fallujah II.

The irony of the twenty-first century Information Age is that the American public is uninformed as never before about the most crucial information in our lives. The new Age of Ignorance amidst information riches is made possible precisely because modern means of communication lend themselves to manipulation by wealthy, powerful forces that understand how to make an emotional impact that will obscure the real issues. This observation is as true of the Baath Party as it is of the Republican Party, as true of al-Jazeerah as it is of Fox Cable News.

The difficulties of political interpretation are, it seems to me, underscored by the interview that Majid Musa, deputy speaker of the Iraqi National Council and leader of the Iraqi Communist Party, gave to Egyptian Radio (BBC World Monitoring, Nov. 23).

The Egyptian interview asked what the participants at the Sharm El Sheikh conference could be expected to agree on.

“Majid: I believe that there is a common ground and that a consensus is possible. The continuation of the unstable conditions, the deteriorating security situation in Iraq and the activities of terrorists and saboteurs will not be restricted within Iraqi borders. The impact of those crimes and this terrorism will spread throughout the region, unless we take timely measures and cooperate to ward off such dangers.” He added that the issue of the exact shape of Iraqi federalism was an internal affair.

The Cairo interviewer asked him about a deadline for withdrawal of US troops. (France had pressed for a deadline of Dec. 31, 2005, for this withdrawal, but the other Sharm El Sheikh participants, including Egypt, rejected it).

“Majid: As for the other issue, which is the withdrawal of foreign forces, it is an objective that all Iraqis without exception seek to achieve. Nobody could claim that they are keener than the Iraqi people to see a quick end to the presence of foreign troops. However, the problem is deciding when those troops could depart. We have not yet built sufficient military, police or security forces to protect the security of Iraq.”

It appears to me that the stance of the Iraqi Communist Party, at least for now, is not so far from that of the US government– curb terrorists and saboteurs, decide on federalism in the Iraqi parliament, and be patient about foreign troops until an Iraqi military can be trained. That is, the ICP seems somewhat to the right of the Gaullists here!

What seems indisputable to me is that Spencer Ackerman at Iraq’d is correct to be skeptical of the Bush administration arguments, reported by David Ignatius of the Washington Post, that the Sunni Arabs can be so beaten down and terrified that they will fall in line behind Iyad Allawi! See the comments, above, of Mark Levine.

Rather, the political wages of Fallujah are ethnic division, anger and sullenness that could cripple Iraq well into the future.

If this observation is true, then the current operation in Babil province, which continued on Thursday, is also unlikely to yield the political fruits sought.

In addition, AFP writes, “On the ground, four people were killed and 16 wounded in two bomb attacks in Samarra, one of them a suicide attack, and another south of the main northern oil capital of Kirkuk.”

Radio Sawa Iraq is reporting, via Reuters, a huge explosion at the Green Zone (government offices and US embassy) in Baghdad, resulting in a big column of smoke. How you have elections when the most politically important parts of the capital are in this condition, I have no idea.

According to AFP, the story being trumpeted all day on Fox Cable News about the discovery of chemical and anthrax weapons labs in Fallujah by Iraqi troops is questionable to say the least. The US military denies it and Hans Blix is skeptical. I smell the troika of Iyad Allawi, Naqib al-Falah, and Hazem Shaalan behind this announcement, which will be remembered even if it is discredited.

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Bloggers Respond

The weblogging community responds to Colonel Yigal Carmon’s outrageous threat to sue me over my characterization of MEMRI as a well-funded organization dedicated to cherry-picking Arab news reports to make them look bad:

Brad DeLong says “MEMRI Needs to Be Moved to “Unreliable”: Ah. Clearly it’s time to stop reading (and citing) MEMRI.”

Henry Farrell says,

“MEMRI’s threat seems to me to be more about trying to create difficulties for Cole with the University of Michigan than the nugatory possibility of an adverse judgement in court against him. There’s no remotely plausible theory under which the University of Michigan can be held responsible for Cole’s private activities or statements, even if they were libellous. However, a state-funded university would presumably prefer, all things considered, not to be embroiled in an action of this sort, however frivolous. Thus, the inclusion of University of Michigan in the complaint seems to me to be an inept class of an indirect threat to embarrass the university and thus perhaps put Cole in a tricky position. I’m glad to see that he’s treating it with the contempt that it deserves.”

[Cole says: Thanks, Henry. The University Counsel and I spoke, and he underlined that the University of Michigan would never take a position on faculty speech and I can assure readers that there isn't the remotest possibility that the hallowed Home of the Wolverines would take such a clumsy feint seriously.]

Abu Aardvark says,

“To be blunt, Professor Cole is right. MEMRI routinely selects articles which show the worst of Arab discourse, even where this represents only a minority of actually expressed opinion, while almost never acknowledging the actual distribution of opinion. As for the Reform Project, it tends to select statements by pro-American reformers who concentrate on criticizing other Arabs, again with little regard for the real debates going on among Arabs. Your selective translations therefore offer a doubly warped perspective on the Arab debates: first, over-emphasizing the presence of radical and noxious voices; and second, over-emphasizing the importance of a small and marginal group of Arabs who share your own prejudices. What you leave out is almost the entire Arab political debate which really matters to Arabs: a lively debate on satellite stations such as al Jazeera and al Arabiya and in the elite Arab press about reform, international relations, political Islam, democracy, and Arab culture which English-speaking readers would greatly benefit from knowing about.”

Further evidence for this point of view is available in the form of Brian Whitaker’s debate with Yigal Carmon at the Guardian website. Whitaker’s points suggest that the widespread impression that MEMRI is accurate but selective may be too generous. Serious lapses in accuracy are also apparent, and so far unexplained.

Matthew Yglesias writes: “Cole seems to be in the right on the key point of factual dispute, though I’m willing to believe he’s gone too far in intimating that MEMRI is some kind of front for the Israeli government. More to the point, MEMRI is clearly seeking to use the legal system to silence people who disagree with its politics.” [Cole says: Matthew, I don't think I actually intimated that before now, though it is beginning to occur to me and others now that the heavy-handedness has been underlined.]

Maxspeak says “MEMRI’s game is to troll for objectionable statements in Arabic-language publications — not a daunting task, to be sure — and foist them on the non-Arabic speaking publics in the West as an endless object lesson in Islamic backwardness and intolerance.”

Kurt Nimmo appears convinced that MEMRI is a black psy-ops project of Israeli military intelligence aimed at shaping Western public opinion in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim directions.

Begging to Differ points out that MEMRI is probably a “public figure” for US legal purposes. This is the standard for such actions in such instances: “If a plaintiff alleging defamation is considered a ‘public figure,’ or a person or entity whose views and actions on public issues and events are of concern to other citizens, that plaintiff must prove the alleged defamation was made with ‘actual malice’–that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” [Cole says: "Actually, everything I said was true, as far as I know, and none of my points has been seriously contested with solid information."]

American Amnesia says,

“MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Organization, hasn’t received attention here at American Amnesia for one simple reason: it’s a compost of specious translations of worst-of-the-worst opinion pieces coming out of the Arabic press. Think of an organization dedicated to translating into Arabic the Jerry Falwells, Bob Jones, and other scraps of ideological detritus bobbing around in our local papers, and you’ve got MEMRI’s mission and net worth.”

(Cole notes: Until I see figures for all the MEMRI offices, and we have an idea of how much of their work exactly is done in those offices and perhaps elsewhere, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I deny that I have misstated their funding. It is silly to think that the nearly $2 mn. that underwrites their Washington office is anything but the tip of their financial iceberg.)

The blogging world has been enormously supportive, and hundreds if not thousands of emails have been sent in protest to MEMRI. I have by no means listed all the interesting reactions on the Web to this issue. I am very grateful. It seems to me that if we don’t make a stand here, freedom of speech on the internet is endangered.

P.S. The Boris and Natasha of Arab-Israeli politics, are saying that I brandished a lawsuit against them for putting up a dossier on me and encouraging people to spy on me for them, in 2002. Damn straight I did. And nor are these two incidents comparable. I did not threaten to sue them for libel, but for personal harassment. I didn’t cyberstalk Yigal Carmon. In fact, I don’t think I ever even mentioned his name until he threatened me. As a private person, he should be left alone. The rhetorical strategy of alleging that if you ever threatened to sue someone on solid grounds, you may not complain about someone else frivolously threatening you with a SLAPP, is typical of these polemicists. Move on. Nothing of interest to see here.

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